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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 3
HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
FOR EIGHT YEARS
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATION
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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Chapter I
SOCIALISM EMPTIES THE CHURCHES
The aim of the Black International is to protect and augment
the power and wealth of the Church. Since however, the clergy do
not share their power, much less their wealth, with the laity, we
may define this aim more sharply. It is to protect and augment
their own wealth and power, especially that of the higher clergy
and the Pope and his Court. History compels us to add that in
pursuing this aim the Black International is not restrained by any
considerations or sentiments which are not strictly ecclesiastical.
That statement, a Catholic may object, may be formally correct
but it is malicious. The Church, he holds -- because in this
respect the priests have taken him into their confidence wants
wealth and power only in order that it may more effectively promote
the spiritual interests and eternal welfare of men. So we
understood; and we understood also that that is why the priest
must, whenever it is necessary, ignore all ordinary human emotions
and interests. What are the things of time compared with those of
eternity? It is a nice formula. The sufferings of 100,000,000
Chinese under the red hooves of the Japanese are doubtless sad to
contemplate but the spiritual welfare of all Asia requires that the
Pope shall not say so to his friend the Mikado. The first of
Pacelli-Pius's famous Five Peace Principles, which won the
admiration of the world, is "the right to life and freedom of all
nations, big and small, powerful and weak. But the spiritual
welfare of the Abyssinians (and the Spaniards, Albanians, Greeks,
Serbs, etc.) is much more important than life or freedom so he had
no harsh words for his friend Mussolini.
We might, indeed, if we had leisure to go into these matters,
inquire whether the enormous accession of wealth and power to the
Church after the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century
and again during the Renaissance was really followed by a great
spiritual uplift or by a remarkable corruption of both people and
Church. But we have not time for these digressions. Here we have to
consider contemporary events.
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Now we saw in the first booklet of this series that the need
of the Black International to protect its wealth and power was
never greater than it is today. In my Decay of the Church of Rome
(1909) I proved to the satisfaction of everybody except Catholic's,
who have a short way of differing from me without reading me, that
in the course of the nineteenth century the Church lost, in actual
seceders and descendants of seceders, about 100,000,000 followers.
It lost almost if not quite as many during the next 35 years, or
between 1900 and 1935. The leakage steadily continued, even
increased in all countries except those, such as Ireland and Poland
in which the priests could keep then people in blinkers. The
progress of Socialism, against which the Church had declared war to
the death, made the leakage worse, and after the Russian Revolution
it became a flood. In Spain, Italy, Austria, and Latin America we
have the decisive evidence of electoral statistics, which show a
world-loss of at least 60,000,000 since the last war. Even for a
small country like Czecho-Slovakia Catholics, we shall see, admit
a loss of about 2,000,000 in fifteen years, and the drift continued
in America and Britain. Nor was it only a question of the
humiliation of losing so many members. The Church in Germany was
estimated to have a wealth of $20,000,000,000, and it was melting
away.
These spectacular losses are the key to the policy which
Pacelli followed, first as Secretary of State and then as Pope Pius
XII. When you know of these indisputable losses, which are not
obtruded upon public notice, you see that the line followed by the
Black International was quite inevitable in view of its primary
aim. It is the folk who do not know of the losses who are puzzled
by the plain evidence of the Italian Church's enthusiastic support
of Mussolini in all his crimes, the Vatican's open alliance with
Japan, or the Pope's strident call upon various governments to
cooperate with him in the extinction, by war, of Bolshevism in
Spain, Russia, China, and Mexico. Therefore in dealing with each
country in which we trace the action of the Black International I
give definite evidence from electoral statistics or Catholic
admissions of the enormous losses of the Church. In the last book
I showed this in the case of Italy and South America.
It is vitally necessary in the case of Germany. References to
the Church in that country suggests to the reader at one moment
that it is tremendously wealthy and powerful -- a good third of the
nation -- and the next day represent it as cowering powerlessly
under the Nazi lash. The American public his been particularly
puzzled by Cardinal Mundelein making himself the chief spokesman of
the Church. Here was a great Churchman, praised in the highest
terms by the Pope and the warmest friend of Pacelli when he visited
America, scourging the Nazis at a time when no statesman in the
world ventured to warn his people of the coming evil.
The human side of these consecrated movements is always
interesting. Mundelein sent larger sums to the Papal treasury than
any other cardinal in the Church and promised even vaster funds
when prosperity returned to Chicago. So the Vatican courageously
refused to condemn him when requested by Hitler to do so. Besides,
it was convenient to have a rather muddle-headed enthusiast
assuring America that these charges of vice against the holy monks
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
of Catholic Germany were wicked Nazi fabrications to cover a
persecution of the Church. It was not necessary to tell Mundelein
that, as we shall see presently, the Pope had already suppressed
the whole body of these Franciscan monks in Westphalia for
comprehensive corruption -- they were all in jail Anyway -- and
that the Catholic bishop of Berlin had told Hitler in a published
letter that the bishops of Germany admitted that there was a large
amount of "moral perversity" in the monastic world. How could
Mundelein know that the Vatican and the German hierarchy were still
pressing Hitler to be friends? He had sworn to exterminate
Bolshevism, after a kiss of betrayal, and there was nothing in the
whole world that the Vatican more fiercely desired than the
destruction of Bolshevism, by hook or by crook, in every country.
When the Pope, who would presently so solemnly assert "the
right to life and freedom of all nations," was asked to condemn the
invasion of Norway, the beginning of Hitler's monstrous enslavement
of Europe, he objected that there were only 2,000 Catholics in
Norway and he had to think of the consequences for the "30,000,000
Catholics of Germany." What he meant was that, since the Church of
Rome does not admit that a man can quit it when his reason or his
conscience demands this, there were in Germany some 30,000,000 men
and women and their children who had received Catholic baptism. In
1905 the Church claimed to have 25,000,000 members. Taking into
account the beautiful fertility of Catholic parents these ought by
1940 to have grown to at least 35,000,000. In point of fact it is
easy to show that there were at the latter date not more than
15,000,000 German Catholics, probably not more than 10,000,000.
This implies a loss in the present generation of at least
15,000,000, probably 20,000,000; and this loss is not so much due
to the action of the Nazis as to the rapid growth of Socialism and
Communism since 1918. It implies also a proportionate loss of
wealth.
The new world-conditions which led to the disintegration of
the medieval Church everywhere -- the advance of culture, universal
free education, cheap literature and free libraries, the growth of
urban and industrial populations, etc, -- had had at least as
devastating an effect in Germany as in Britain and America. Think
of the huge circulation of such writers as Nietzsche and Haeckel.
In cities like Berlin hardly a fifth of the inhabitants went to
church. But in Germany the Roman Church had special conditions.
Bismarck had switched off his attack on Catholicism from 1872 to
1881 and directed it to the Socialists, and he now had the
enthusiastic alliance of the Church. Some say that Socialism is a
crime, and some that it is folly, but the Church said that it is a
sin; which, of course, is much more likely to got men to avoid it.
The Catholics organized politically in a Center Party and a
Bavarian People's Party, and there was a very sharp line of
division between. Catholic votes and those of the sinful Socialists
and even worse Communists. Thirty years ago the Social Democratic
Federation dropped its official opposition to all Churches, on the
painfully familiar plea of Socialist leaders that this would
shorten the path to power, but this did not affect the
irreconcilable hostility between Socialists and Catholics. In fact,
when Communism in turn became a powerful force, as it did in
Germany, and in the Vatican policy Socialists and Communists were
lumped together as Bolsheviks, the mutual antagonism was increased.
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I have earlier explained that in the very promising new phase
of German life between 1924 and 1930 the Catholics and Socialists
cooperated politically, and when Nazism grew they had another link
in hatred of their common enemy. Catholics for the first time rose
to the highest offices in the state. But the bishops knew, and
Pacelli who lived in Germany from 1917 to 1929 saw, that the
leakage from the Church was now disastrous. Before the 1914-1918
war the Catholic vote had already fallen, in spite of the high
Catholic birth rate. from one-fifth to one-sixth of the total
electorate, whereas Catholic writers like the Jesuit Father Krose
had estimated that by superior birth rate alone Catholics would
raise their percentage of the population by one percent every
decade. After the war their percentage, instead of rising, fell
steeply, though the masses of Catholic peasants and farmers
continued to have large families while the masses of non-Catholic
urban workers increasingly practiced birth control. It is enough to
quote the figures at the last democratic elections. In November
1932, when the last entirely free election was held, the combined
Catholic vote was 5,326,583 in a total of 35,000,000 votes or not
much more than one-seventh. In March, 1933, when Hitler was
Chancellor and there was a good deal of trickery and intimidation
-- but, we shall see, complete freedom for the Catholics -- the
Catholic vote was 5,496,054 in 39,316,873, or less than one-
seventh. Catholics who were represented in American literature as
one-third of the population could not in this supreme crisis get
one-seventh of the adult community. Their proportion would have
been even less if they had not had the energetic support of the
Jews against Hitler, as the Catholic Emil Ritter shows in his work
Der Weg des Politischen Katholizismus (1934). The Jews were ordered
by their rabbis to vote with the Catholics, and in Berlin the
Catholics ran a Jewish candidate.
Now turn to the other side, At the time when the Church began
to fight the Socialists the latter could poll only 349,000 votes.
By 1907 the Socialist vote had risen to 3,010,800. The total number
of voters had doubled: the Socialist vote had increased ten-fold:
the Catholic vote had, taking into account the growth of
population, considerably decreased. But again it will be enough to
quote the final figures, just before the sun of freedom sank below
the horizon. In November, 1932, the Socialists and Communists
polled 13,712,292 votes, or much more than a third of the adult
community, Before the March election Goering's men had fired the
Reichstag to raise the Communist scare and, as Hitler was
Chancellor, Socialists and Communists were forbidden to hold
meetings and their papers suppressed, so the Communist vote fell
considerably and the Socialist vote slightly. Yet the two parties
still cast 12,321,684 votes, or moire than twice as many as the
combined (and free) Catholic parties and nearly a third of the
whole. The Nazis, I may add, even in the final election, with the
help of the Communist scare, the Pope's blessing -- as we shall see
-- and corrupt tactics, did not get one-half of the total vote
(17,265,823 votes out of 39,316,873). Germany never voluntarily
accepted Hitler. His party took power because it was the largest of
ten.
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The glibness with which works of reference continue year after
year to say that Catholics in Germany are one-third of the
population, or 25,000,000 out of 75,000.000, make the German puzzle
worse than ever for most people. How could a group of men who set
out upon one of the most colossal aggressive enterprises in history
begin by defying and persecuting one-third of the nation in
addition to a savage repression of the still larger body of
Socialists and Communists? Why are all our experts (or oracles)
convinced that the overwhelming majority of the German people
support Hitler yet pay respectful attention to the shrieks of men
like the late Cardinal Mundelein that the Catholic third of the
nation is bitterly persecuted?
The truth is plainly shown in the above figures. As late as
the November election of 1932 -- we shall see presently what
happened after it -- the Catholic hierarchy was violently opposed
to Socialism and Communism as well as to Hitler and insisted on
Catholics voting for Catholic candidates. This was easy in Germany,
where the main body of the Catholics is found in certain provinces
where they form the great majority of the community. On this
occasion, moreover, the appeal of the bishop to their flocks was
the most urgent and solemn since Bismarck had fought the Church 60
years earlier. Is it seriously suggested that any large proportion
of genuine Catholics voted, in so grave a crisis, either for the
Socialists or for the bunch of apostates who, their leaders said,
were just as anxious as the Socialists to abolish the Church? If
you want to make an allowance for invalids and other possibilities
remember that on the other hand the Catholics had the support of
half a million Jews, who were too scattered to have their own
candidates. In the circumstance's the voting figures give us a much
safer indication of the truth than any statements of writers.
These figures show that in 1932 Catholics were 13 percent, not
33 percent, of the adult community. A desperate apologist might
suggest that in Germany, differently from in other countries, the
young are more religious than the older folk and this would give
the Church a larger total than the election figure's suggest. Such
an apologist would have to be very ignorant of German conditions.
In Great Briton, priests publicly admit that in many towns 50
percent of the boys quit the Church when they leave the school. And
in Britain the atmosphere is not quite as poisonous for the young,
from the Church angle, as in Nazi Germany. You have heard of the
Strength through Joy movement, but you may not have heard how
youths have a song with the refrain, "On the heath and in the
meadows I lose my Strength through Joy," how working girls sing on
the streets a hymn to Mary which suggests -- I forget the exact
words -- that her name was probably Cohen and her baby was born on
the wrong side of the blanket. But suppose we take a generous view.
Thirteen percent of the nation in 1932 meant about 12,000,000
Catholics. Make what allowance you like for absenteeism from the
polls (though every possible voter was whipped up) or other
factors, but you cannot raise that figure to 15,000,000, which is
only half what the Pope claims.
And it is admitted that since 1932 the Church has suffered
further and catastrophic losses. The organization which held the
Catholic body together is torn to shreds. Think of the numerous
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
societies (Knights of Columbus, Daughters of Mary, etc.) which in
America are extremely important in keeping the faithful loyal and
docile to the clergy. They are all suppressed in Germany. The two
political parties are dissolved. The Catholic press, the supreme
instrument of the clergy, is ruined. "All that remains of the one-
time great Catholic press of Germany," said the Vatican Radio in
March (1941), "are a few parish magazines, and even these have to
be edited with the greatest care." All Catholic schools in the
Catholic provinces have been closed and all the charitable and
other institutions which were one of the chief advertisements of
the Church have been taken over. All religious brothers, nuns,
etc., have been ignominiously expelled from education and every
Catholic child knows from its Nazi playmates that this is said to
be on account of a discovery of a plague of some kind of shameful
wickedness amongst them. A ghastly reproach has been put upon the
whole by jailing thousands of them for moral turpitude and
seduction of the young. Then there is the economic pressure, as
good jobs must be got from Nazi bosses, the social pressure, and so
on. There cannot be more than 10,000,000 Catholics in Germany
today, and that means a loss of at least 15,000,000, if not
20,000,000. The Catholic author of a special article in the London
Daily Express (November 15, 1939) the most widely circulated paper
in the world said that by 1936 priests in the Rhineland admitted
that they had lost half their flocks and added that "if the Nazis
remain in power another decade Roman Catholicism may be obliterated
from Germany." That is stronger language than I have used.
Any man who finds this difficult to understand may reflect on
the following experience. A friend of mine, a person of high
character and a Catholic by baptism, went in 1937 to pay a
prolonged visit to relatives and friends in the Rhineland, his old
home. Everywhere he found the Catholics speaking with genial
disdain both of the Nazis and the Church. It was a mainly Catholic
district, and when my friend asked what they thought of the charges
of vice against the monks they laughingly replied that they had
always had a suspicion about life in those institutions. Catholic
belief, in other words, was never so deep amongst them as Catholic
writers pretend. They just wanted to be left alone to drink and
feed and smoke in the way of their fathers. How are such folk
likely to have fared under the pressure of the last five years?
However that may be, stupendous losses are, as I said,
admitted. And these losses are the key to the Vatican policy in
Germany. It is to check them and to recover ground that, in spite
of one deception after another, the Vatican has ordered German
Catholics to submit and has tried year after year to enter into
alliance with Hitler. That is why the Pope in spite of his discreet
letters of sympathy to Queen Wilhelmina and King Leopold and his
protests against the ghastly attempts to annihilate the Poles after
they had been conquered, never uttered one word of straight moral
condemnation of any one of the long series of cynical breaches of
treaties, ruthless aggressions, and foul treatment of subject
peoples by which the Nazi government has roused against itself the
anger and disgust of the whole free world except its Catholic
allies. That terrible indictment I will proceed to justify point by
point.
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Chapter 11
THE POPE JOINS THE GANG
We saw that two grave dilemmas confronted Pacelli when, in
1930, he became Secretary of State to the late Pope and took over
the supreme control of the international policy of the Vatican.
There was an acrid quarrel with Mussolini over the terms of the
Treaty and Concordat he had signed and a request from Japan that
the Papacy should recognize its annexation of Manchuria, which the
conscience of the civilized world condemned. We saw how he resolved
these dilemmas. He linked the Church firmly to two partners of the
criminal Conspiracy; which would come to be known as the Axis. He
had hardly accomplished this, when the third problem arose. Hitler,
doubtless encouraged by the holy alliance with Italy and Japan,
sent an emissary to ask for recognition of his share in the brewing
plot against civilization. He got it. The Black International
joined the gang.
When you sum up events in this bold fashion many folk shake
their heads skeptically, so, although in the mad rush of life in
our time it seems almost to be ancient history -- it is less than
ten years old -- I must briefly repeat the evidence of what
happened in 1932. Remember that Pacelli knew Germany thoroughly. He
had left it, after twelve years close observation of its life, in
1929, and his new office as Secretary of State compelled him to
watch carefully the critical course of events in that country.
Bitterly as he hated Socialism, because he expected it
everywhere sooner or later to turn to the Russian model and declare
religion "the opium of the people," he was fully aware that in face
of the Nazi threat and in view of the distress which the world-
slump and the sudden cessation of loans had brought upon the
country the Catholics were cooperating with the Socialists under a
Catholic Chancellor, Bruning, and later the Catholic General von
Schleicher. Bruning was a shrewd opportunist who leaned to the
Right or the Left as occasion required, but he was a good
statesman. As long as he held together the coalition of Liberals,
Catholics, Jews, Socialists, and Communist the Nazi's had no chance
of success. It was in very large part the Vatican that ruined this
defense and the leadership of Bruning by forcing him away from the
Socialists and patronizing the Nazis.
That Pacelli was guilty of a criminal blunder must be
admitted. He knew that Hitler had already given proof of his
duplicity and of his infamous intentions but like Mussolini, he
gambled on the success of Nazi militarism and the spinelessness of
the democracies. All the world now knows how first the German
industrialists, headed by Thyssen and Hagenberg, brought their
millions to the Nazi treasury and used every means in their power
to influence their Liberal and Radical workers in Hitler's favor.
The new Nazi Party emerged from as slimy a mess of intrigue and
deception as one can imagine. Hitler had won a large body of the
workers -- the Nazi group had started as a semi-Socialist working-
class movement, pure and simple -- by promising to improve their
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condition at the expense of "the bloated capitalist." By 1931
Hitler welcomed the gold of the capitalist -- and any other gold
that came along -- and sold his semi-Socialism. Ambassador Dodd,
who was then in Berlin, describes in his Diary how he saw the
royalists and land-owners as well as the industrialists buzzing
round the Nazi headquarters.
Hitler double-crossed them all. He took their money and rose
in November, 1932, to the electoral strength which I have
described. In 1930 the Nazi vote had been one-sixth of the whole.
In 1932 it was one-third. But they had used up all their resources
and were very dejected. They could get no more from the Liberals
and Conservatives and they could not approach the Socialists and
Communists, however ready they were to sell what soul they had to
the devil. What about the Catholics?
Von Papen was the queerest figure in the bunch of Nazi
leaders. His Catholic standing was such that he received a high
decoration from the Vatican -- he is a Chamberlain of the Papal
Court -- and he was a friend of the very conservative President
Hindenburg and the Prussian aristocrats. In the summer of 1932 he
had, through his influence with Hindenburg, got the Chancellorship
away from Bruning, though he had in turn soon lost it to the
Catholic General von Schleicher. Note carefully that Germany thus
had three Catholic Chancellors (Premiers) in succession, an honor
of which they had not hitherto dreamed, under the Liberal-Socialist
coalition, which Pacelli helped to destroy in favor of the Nazis.
Von Schleicher, in close touch with the German hierarchy, adopted
an even more pronounced policy of cooperation with the Socialists
against the Nazis than Bruning had followed. With their support he
dared to publish the fact that the aristocratic Prussian land-
owners had shamelessly dipped into the public funds, and Von Papen
easily persuaded Hindenburg to protect their noble caste by
dismissing Von Schleicher and making Hitler Chancellor. He would
now control the next election; and the greasy Goering would do
dirty work in the country for him.
About the same time, the beginning of 1933, Von Papen was sent
to Rome to propose an alliance with the Vatican. It is quite stupid
to affect to dispute these statements because Von Papen in a
published speech (Der 12 November, 1933, p. 7), which I have read,
actually boasts of his work. On November 9, 1933, he made this
speech to a very large audience of Catholic working men at Cologne,
speaking as one Catholic to others and rousing them to support
Hitler. He said, unctuously: "Providence destined me to render an
essential service in the birth of the government of the national
regeneration." As his bosom friends, Hitler and Goebbels, were
apostates and half the secondary leaders were notoriously
sodomists, I do not wonder that folk find this chapter of German
history perplexing, but that Von Papen did in fact propose to
Pacelli, in Hitler's name, that he should order the German
Catholics to drop their hostility to the Nazis in return for, when
they attained power, a favorable Concordat with the Church --
during his twelve years in Germany Pacelli had tried in vain to get
this -- and that Pacelli accepted is abundantly proved, and most
clearly by the subsequent course of events.
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Early in 1933 the statement was widely repeated. in the German
Press that the bishops, meeting at Fulda, had received instructions
from Rome to abandon the hostility to Hitler and had passed these
on to the clergy. It is further stated in all histories of the time
that in preparation for the March election only Catholics and Nazis
were allowed to organize and appeal to the country. See, in
particular, the account, which will certainly not be accused of
anti-Catholic bias, in Seldes (The Vatican). He adds that one of
the Catholic clerical leaders, Msgr. Kaas, was sent to Rome to
advise Pacelli to agree and that he said of Hitler: "This man, the
bearer of high ideal's, will do all that is necessary to save the
nation from catastrophe."
I gather that there were already some in the German Church who
were in favor of alliance with Hitler. A few years later one of the
most important priests in Munich died and his funeral was
officially honored by the Nazi government; and in the heat of the
later struggle, when many German Catholics blamed Cardinal
Faulhaber, head of their Church, the Valerist paper, the Irish
Independent (August 13, 1938), which was in close touch with the
clergy, said that "Cardinal Faulhaber was very friendly to National
Socialism in the beginning" -- in other words, until Hitler double-
crossed the Vatican. Hitler had by this time begun to wash out any
suspicion that he would, if returned to power, injure the Church.
In one of his first speeches in the Reichstag, on March 23, 1933,
he said that "as we see in Christianity the unshakable foundation
of the moral life so it is our duty to continue to cultivate
friendly relations with the Holy See and to develop them."
The great majority in the Church could not so easily reconcile
themselves to cooperation with a disreputable bunch of apostates
and sodomists, and there were many complaints in the Catholic press
when the bishops circulated the Papal order to observe at least
benevolent neutrality. The terms of the order are, of course, not
known but we may gather them from the result. The Annual Register
for 1933, says, in recording Hitler's triumph at the election: "The
gigantic swing-over of the Catholic middle-class in West and South
Germany to the Nazi Party broke the power of the old middle-class
Catholic parties, the Center and the Bavarian People's Party" (p.
169). The word "gigantic" will seem misplaced if you look back upon
the electoral statistics I have given. The Catholic vote fell but
not so heavily. But note that the writer is referring only to the
middle class, and it is significant that the Catholic vote fell
even by 20,000 when every party feverishly whipped all its
supporters to the poll.
It is, at all events, another witness to the change of
attitude of the Catholics under ecclesiastical direction, and a
fourth, and still more important witness, is a French priest
writing later in the French Catholic fortnightly, the Revue des
Deux Mondes (January 15, 1935, article "Le catholicisme et la
politique mondiale") and boasting of it as one of the diplomatic
triumphs of the Vatican.
But surely these witnesses are superfluous in view of the
acknowledged fact that on July 20, 1933, Pacelli proudly signed the
Concordat he had arranged with the Nazis. Does anybody suppose that
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
the Nazis' who are now represented as from the start a horde of
irreligious blackguards, went out of their way after they had won
their triumph, to promise Rome that they would respect rights which
it claimed and that were drastically opposed to their principles?
The man who writes history on suspicions and assumptions, cannot
complain if his readers are skeptical, but the apologist who
suggests such things as this must have readers who are incapable of
ordinary judgment. Hitler's aim was to form a totalitarian state in
the most literal sense: a state in which every implement of
instruction or mind-forming should be used by Nazi officials to
instil racial pride and a readiness for aggressive war. Yet the
first thing he does after securing power is to promise a Church
which he hates that it shall control the education of millions of
children, continue to have a press that is pledged to
internationalism and peace, and draft its members into societies
and fraternities for the cult of a Jewish Bible and a Gospel of
Peace. He was carrying out a bargain; but one that he never had the
least intention of honoring in practice.
We no more say that the Black International put Hitler in
power than we say that it caused the war. We will not even linger
to consider how much influence the Papal policy had amongst the
various corrupt factors that put him in power. The point is that
the Cross embraced the Swastika: the Pope joined the Gang. The
Vatican sold its position as international moral censor as
shamefully as it had sold it to the other partners of the Axis.
Incredible? Then let the apologist quote any Papal condemnations of
the appalling crimes against humanity and civilization that have
been committed every year since Hitler seized power. I decline to
count mild protests against actions which injured the Church.
The world, bemused by a press which could see nothing in the
future except "the menace of Bolshevism," took little notice of
this at the time. But let it not now be suggested that perhaps
Pacelli himself understood Nazism no more than the majority of
folk. After twelve years in Germany for the single purpose of
studying developments! A few years later editors began to profess
that they wished they could penetrate the secret of Nazi policy. It
was tragicomic. The substantial part of Hitler's program -- it was
expanded when he saw the criminal sluggishness of Fiance and
Britain -- had been for years in Mein Kamph. In 1938 I put in the
form of a program, in Hitler's own words, statements of his aims
which are scattered over, and often repeated in, that immense flood
of twaddle. It will be of use if I reproduce the main part of it
here.
"We must see that the strength of our people has, its roots,
not in colonies, but in land of our own in Europe (p. 754). The
regaining of our lost provinces cannot be achieved by solemn
appeals to God as pious hopes but only by force of arms (708). The
South Tyrol and our lost provinces can be won back only by a bloody
struggle (708). The most sacred right in the world is the right to
land that you can till yourself and the holiest sacrifice is the
blood you shed for it (755). Our policy in the East [Russia] must
be that we will win more land for the German people. Since we need
strength for this, yet the mortal enemy of our people, France,
strangles us mercilessly, we must make every sacrifice that is
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necessary to destroy the position of France in Europe (757). This
policy can be carried out only by an alliance with England (689).
There, is no English, American, or Italian statesman who was ever
pro-German. Any man who says that we can form alliances with
foreign nations in virtue of a pro-German spirit in the leading
statesmen of those countries is either an ass or a liar (698). The
alliance with England and Italy will enable Germany to make its
case, under the shelter of such a coalition, all the preparations
that are needed for a final settlement with France (755)."
There, written nearly twenty years ago, is the whole program
of duplicity, callousness, and aggression. As the current
"translation" of Mein Kampf, subsidized by the Nazi government, was
grossly fraudulent. I translated these sentences, which are
expanded and justified at great length in the work, from the 1935
(mature) edition, and sent them to two editors of radical London
papers, with a circulation of about 4,000,000 copies, who professed
to be puzzled about Hitler's intentions. Both refused to print my
article, and Britain slumbered and blundered on.
If any man supposes that Pacelli and the Vatican did not know
the contents of Mein Kampf, which already circulated by the
million, he must have a singularly low estimate of the ability with
which their work is conducted. Before Pacelli put his pen to
parchment the Day of the Long Knife, about which Nazi youth's had
sung chants all over Germany for two years, occurred. More than
100,000 Jews, Communists, Socialists, Pacifists, etc., were
barbarously treated and robbed of their possessions and in many
cases their lives. Pacelli amiably continued to work out the
details of his compact with the devil, and the church bells rang
when it was signed. And the German bishops deputed Cardinal Bertram
to assure Hitler that they were "glad to express as soon as
possible" their joy at the agreement and their "sincere readiness
to cooperate to their best ability with the new government" (the
Catholic Universe, August 18, 1933). Hitler's followers, especially
the notorious pervert Roehm and his friends, scorned the concordat
and insulted the Church, and infringements of the agreement began
at once. But when Catholic writers say that Cardinal Faulhaber at
once took a firm stand against the Nazi they gravely mislead their
reader's.
The sermons which Faulhaber delivered can be read in an
English translation Judaism, Christianity, and Germany, 1933). They
are a painful exhibition of moral cowardice and sycophancy. I have
already quoted the Valerist organ saying that Faulhaber was
favorable to Nazism "in the beginning." It adds that "the fact that
he found it impossible later not to oppose certain elements of
their policy, hurt us as well as annoyed them." What were these
elements? Did he, as a Catholic prelate professes to regard as his
duty, censure Hitler for his perjury in violating his solemn oath
to preserve the Constitution? Did he denounce the brutality of the
attack on Jews and Socialists? Not a word. His attack was purely
theological. The Anti-Semitic language of the Nazis was opposed to
the Catholic doctrine that the Old Testament was inspired and that
Jehovah was the God of Christianity and was incarnated in the Jew
Jesus. The Nazis laughed at him. Rosenberg, who had at that time
some idea that because I admired pre-Nazi Germany I could be won to
support them, sent me a copy of his drastic reply.
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In the preceding book I said that Pacelli at this time wrote
the most severe attack on Hitler that ever carne from a Papal
source. He was engaged in his mission -- not a "good will" mission
but arranging a bloody Fascist reaction -- in South America. From
there he sent to Cardinal Schulte at Cologne a letter in which he
roused German Catholics against the Nazi leaders. "When in Satanic
pride, false prophets arise, pretending to be the bearers of a new
creed," he said, it behooved the faithful to stir themselves, I
cannot trace that the Cardinal passed on the warning to his flock
but, in any case, what was the point of the attack?
In June (1934) Hitler had surpassed his record of outrage to
date by the infamous Blood Purge in which Catholic leaders like
General von Schleicher and Strasser were murdered together with
Roehm and other notorious perverts. The excuse was a confused plea
that the party had to be morally purified and that there was a Plot
against Hitler. But whereas in the Russian executions, about which
the world press poured out streams of indignation, the conspiracy
was proved in open court after trials which distinguished foreign
lawyers declared unassailable, there was no pretense of a trial in
Germany. Hitler, already under the influence of the semi-insane
egoism that developed after his success, shouted "I am the law and
justice in Germany", and the men -- hundreds of them -- were shot
down in their houses or their cells! Was this what Pacelli
condemned? Not at all. He had heard that the Nazis were helping
Catholics who favored them to found in Germany a National Catholic
Church, acknowledging no obedience to Rome and finding room for
Nazi doctrines. Notice carefully that Pacelli denounces the Nazis
as "pretending to be the bearers of a new creed". So it was with
the protests of the German Catholic bishops which are quoted. They
protested against the increasing violations of the Concordat by
interference with their schools and their Catholic organizations.
Chapter III
HOW HE HELPED HITLER IN AUSTRIA
We shall resume presently the revolting story of how the Pope,
with Pacelli at his elbow, helped Hitler to consolidate his power
in Germany but at this point it is necessary to turn aside and
consider what was happening in Austria. Bavaria is a sister-state
of Austria rather than of Prussia, and from Munich, its capitol,
Pacelli had watched very closely the development in the southern
Republic. It was of absorbing interest from the ecclesiastical
angle. Austria was the only country in the world where a Catholic
priest, Msgr. Seipel, a man of intense loyalty to the Vatican, had
supreme power. During fourteen year's after the war Seipel, a
professor of moral theology and a leader of the Christian Socialist
movement, was either himself Chancellor (President) or the power
behind the Chancellor. He represented the Church, for it at once
transpired that there was as much Socialism in Christian Socialism
as there is science in Christian Science.
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The state was thus a theocracy, the only one in the world
except Thibet, and as such of profound interest to every Vatican
official. This interest was all the greater from the fact that,
while the state was Catholic, its capitol, Vienna, was Socialist
and Atheistic. Socialism and Communism had made the same progress
in Austria after the war and the expulsion of the emperor as they
had made in Germany. In Vienna, Linz, and other industrial towns
the Socialists had outvoted the Catholics and Liberals in the
municipal elections and had won control and carried out their
principles in a civic policy. Two features of their rule must be
noted.
The first is that the Austrian Socialists were emphatically
anti-Catholic. The well-known amiability (Gutmuthlichkeit) of the
Austrian character saved them from the worst libels of Bolsheviks
that were served upon the world-press, but the fierce hostility to
them of the Church, which made fruitless constitutional efforts to
capture Vienna, hardened their attitude to it. Here every vote cast
for Socialist or a Communist was sternly pronounced a vote against
the Church. "Even to this day," says C.A. Macartney, a
distinguished and conservative scholar of Rambridge University,
"the real battle of Austrian Socialism is directed against the
Church" (The Social Revolution in Austria, 1926, p. 54). And the
Socialists continued to win, large numbers from the Church year
after year and to gain ground in the country. At the 1927 election
they polled 830,000 votes outside Vienna and increased their vote
in Vienna by 120,000. Is it a mere coincidence that in that year
the Christian Socialist government began to resort to persecution
and violence?
The second feature was of no interest at all to churchmen but
ought to have been -- and was not -- frankly described in the
press. It is that while Austria as a whole under its clerical
'statesmen' was so badly administered that the League of Nations
had to step in periodically to save it from bankruptcy, Vienna, in
spite of the heavy depression caused by the mutilation of the
country at Versailles, effected a very remarkable social
improvement. I was in Vienna when it took 500 Kronen -- a Krone
used to be worth 50c -- to buy a small apple, and a very small
cake, or the cheapest postage stamp, and half the workers were so
near "starving" that, the police told me, civil war was feared. Yet
after years of this, and still seriously crippled economically,
Vienna made extraordinary progress in education, housing, and other
social reforms. I have described it elsewhere and need say here
only that every impartial social student in Europe acknowledged it.
Macartriey says that in a few months the Socialist Municipal
Council "did more to better the condition of the masses than had
previous decades of legislation from above": Catholic legislation,
you understand, A London daily which is opposed to Socialism said
of this Socialist administration after the Catholics had
treacherously destroyed it that it had been "a model of democratic
government, as close to the ideal platonic Republic as the world
has ever seen" (News-Chronicle, February 12, 1935).
The British editor was wrong on one point. Vienna was not
closer to the ideal Republic than Moscow, and Madrid and (with
reserves on account of the mass of illiteracy) Mexico City were
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approaching it under Socialist rule. If it seems rash to claim that
this was of no interest from the ecclesiastical angle you have only
to reflect on the facts. Had the Vatican, indeed in this case
Catholics throughout the world, given any consideration to the
actual social fruits of Bolshevism when from 1935 onward they
shrieked for its extinction in Russia, Spain, and Mexico? The laity
were obviously ignorant of the truth. Their Catholic press never
mentioned countries or cities under Socialist rule except to repeat
the most venomous libels about their social condition. Were the
higher clergy equally ignorant? If you can suppose that they were,
you have to conclude that they were blind to every issue but one --
the wealth and power of the Black International.
As I have written at length elsewhere, particularly in the
Appeal to Reason Library No. 5., on the development in Austria I
sum up the events briefly, with the addition of a few details that
have since transpired. The most important of these additions is
that we have now to review all these events since 1930 in the light
of Pacelli's scheme to have Socialism destroyed by alliance with
anti-Socialist powers, however criminal and unsavory they might be.
In 1934 his plan was not fully developed. He saw Socialism spread
in Germany but the destructive power was still almost below the
political horizon when he left the country. He saw it spread, with
devastating consequences to the Catholic missions, in China, and he
linked the Papacy with Japan. He saw it in South America and went
there to bring the Church and the wealthy to a practical agreement.
He saw it in Mexico but, for lack of definite evidence, we do not
say that in his visit to the States he encouraged the idea of a
beautiful Catholic-Wall-Street alliance. He saw it in Spain and
promoted the slowly maturing plot to destroy it. He saw it in
Russia, but until 1936 he still dreamed of a friendly alliance with
the Soviet authorities, and it was only when he definitely
abandoned this hope that he gave the Church the slogan: Extinguish
Bolshevism in Russia, China, Mexico and Spain. It was already
extinct, with his assistance, in Germany and Italy.
In 1933 his plans were still piecemeal, and Austria was the
next obvious, province for his intrigues. By this time it was
evident that in a field of fair propaganda and free discussion the
Socialists won every time, and it could not plausibly be said in
the case of Austria, as it was lyingly said of Italy and Germany,
that Socialism led to distress and disorder. The only serious
criticism I have seen of the fine social work done in Vienna is
that it was financed by foreign loan's which were advanced for a
different purpose. That is false The city council at Vienna never
received any part of the advances. They went to the Christian
Socialist government, which means in large part to the Church.
Vienna paid its way by taxes and a financial system of great
ability.
There was a special difficulty in the case of Austria: the
mutual jealousy of Mussolini and Hitler, who still hated and
distrusted each other and each wanted control of Austria. The
Vatican favored Italy, especially as before the end of 1933 Hitler
betrayed his duplicity and Austria was predominantly Catholic. In
1931 the Pope, assisted by Pacelli, had issued an Encyclical to the
effect that the Italian corporative state was (especially as it
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bowed to Canon Law, put education under the Church, and heavily
subsidized the clergy) the model for Catholic countries. The
corporative state meant, of course, the destruction of Socialism
and Trade Unions, the workers being drafted into corporations under
the firm hand of Church and State, and the recognition of the
capitalists right of private property (or all the wealth he could
make) with a right of the state to conscript such of the wealth as
it needed. Portugal had adopted the scheme, as France and Spain
have since done.
Hitler, though he affected to despise the Austrians, was by no
means willing to see it pass under Italian influence or, as the
Catholics wanted, restore the imperial rule, but he was not yet in
a position to force a bargain upon Mussolini. As I quoted, he had
written long before this in Mein Kampf that Germans must win back
by force of arms even the South Tyrol from Italy, which had been
awarded it, at Versailles. This meant the annexation of Austria. He
cynically watched the Church coquetting in Austria with Italian
Fascism. If they chose to destroy Socialism for him, so much the
better. And Socialism was, in spite of its steady progress, doomed
from 1927. It not only mocked the financial ineptness of the
national government but it brought to light a series of grave
scandals in connection with the government and its supporters.
Seipel rallied to his support all the industrialists and landowners
and looked round for a knight in shining armor like Mussolini or
Hitler.
Prince Starhemberg, a conceited puppy of the type of Ciano or
Suner, but a wealthy noble, chose himself for the part. By Seipel's
treacherous connivance and with Italian assistance he was allowed
to create a private Fascist army, the Heimwehr -- "created in its
final form by Seipel," says the Annual Register, and Seipel did
nothing independently of the Vatican -- which very obviously
intended to attack the Socialists and Communists. In fact,
Starhemberg provoked a clash prematurely, but the Catholic
government had so small a majority in the Reichsrath that it was
beaten. Seipel was driven from the Chancellorship and streams of
Austrians quitted the Church (1933).
Seipel and the Church put into the Chancellorship a priest-
ridden little man of peasant extraction and no particular ability
whom the American press came to glorify as "gallant little
Dollfuss." You may remember how he "stood up to Hitler"; though it
was not clearly explained at the time that in resisting Nazism he
was defending Fascism. In his first budget as Chancellor he
admitted a deficit of $70,000,000, a colossal sum for so small a
state and after all the loans, and he rarely had a majority of more
than one in Congress. The railway-men, who were very largely
Socialists, disclosed the fact that, against international
agreement, he was allowing Italy to use Austrian railroads to send
arms secretly into Hungary; which also Italy and the Vatican wanted
to make Fascist and allied to Italy. Dollfuss solemnly assured
France and Britain that the traffic should cease, but he secretly
maintained it, and the Socialists again exposed it. So "the
Socialist watch-dog had to be destroyed." That is the language of
the Annual Register in its impartial summary of the events of 1933.
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Dollfuss went to Rome and had long talks with Mussolini and
Pacelli; with, incidentally, a talk to the Almighty in St. Peters.
You will, of course, not for a moment suspect that he discussed
with Pacelli the plot to destroy Austrian Socialism. The Church
never interferes in polities. But the course of the events that
followed the return of Dollfuss to Vienna clearly shows that this
second step in Hitler's march to world-domination was facilitated,
like the first, by the Black International. And in order to avoid
all suspicion of the use of tainted sources I will give a short
summary of these events as they are described, objectively, in the
Annual Rdgister, which certainly does not lean to Socialism or
Atheism.
Before he had set out for Rome Dollfuss had given a solemn
engagement (his second) to France that he would take no action
against the Socialists for disclosing the Hungarian-Italian
traffic. France and Britain feared Civil war in Austria and were
assured that all parties would be forbidden to store arms. They
were probably aware that both parties were collecting arms, but
while the Fascist Heimwehr was encouraged and made no secret of its
armament, the government took every measure to hamper the
Socialists, who had to store arms very secretly in their model
tenement-blocks. On his return, however, Dollfuss, the idol of the
clergy, disowned his solemn engagements and assumed dictatorial
powers. Mussolini had promised to see him through.
He closed the Reichsrath (Congress) and announced that Austria
was to be "a corporative authoritative state." He suspended the
Mayor of Vienna and abolished the municipal government or paralyzed
it by cutting off its financial resources. He allowed Starhemberg's
army to take over provincial towns and to show itself openly in
Vienna. There is, in fact, evidence that agents of the Heimwehr
offered to sell pieces of artillery to the Socialists in order to
encourage them to rebel. It wits obvious that they were very
seriously threatened with extinction, but the prospect of success
against the government and the Heimwehr (which had artillery), with
Mussolini in the background, was so poor that there was no
agreement on a plan of revolt when the Catholic Fascists put into
circulation a report that they were in a few days going to enter
the blocks of workers tenements in search of the hidden arms and
Dollfuss publicly supported the Heimwehr, large numbers of the
Socialists and the Communists decided to fight. Dollfuss lied to
the world about the struggle he had provoked. He announced that 137
men, women, and children were killed. The number was at least 1500.
Eleven of the leaders were executed and 1188 men and women were
imprisoned; and many of these prisoners testified in court that
they were tortured in jail in the traditional and almost invariable
fashion of clerical counter-revolutions. So sordid was this chapter
of Catholic history from beginning to end that the impartial writer
in the Annual Register (1934, p. 194) concludes his account in
these ironic words:
"At the cost of hundreds if not thousands of lives . . . the
Heimwebr Fascist movement, which was created in its final form by
the late Chancellor Msgr. Ignaz Seipel, achieved in 1934 its oft-
proclaimed aim of the destruction of the Social Democratic Party,
their violent ejection from the control of Vienna to which two-
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thirds of the people had elected them, and the sweeping away of
parliamentary government in Austria. Thus culminated the anti-
Socialist policy inaugurated by the late Msgr. Seipel in 1926."
Seipel had died in 1922, and "gallant little Dollfuss" had,
after a visit to the Vatican, carried his policy to its logical
conclusion. Whatever difficulty we may have in some cases in
tracing the intrigues of the Black International there is none
here. The struggle was ecclesiastical. It was directed by priests
and aimed at restoring the power of the Church from beginning to
end. Pacelli had won his first campaign in his war for the
extinction of Bolshevism.
The Socialists had taken the chief part in the revolution of
1919 against Church and State. It had been, a Socialist historian
says, "the most peaceful and the most humane of all revolutions,"
for the successful republicans "had not hurt a hair of anybody's
head." The only error of this writer is his claim that it was a
unique revolution in its humanity. Five democratic revolutions in
Spain during the nineteenth century. several in Italy and Portugal,
and all the revolutions of 1848 had had the same character; and the
Spanish revolution of 1932 had lived up to the democratic
tradition. And the treachery and truculence of the clerical
counter-revolution of 1934 had followed the model of all such
movements. Yet journalists and essayists everywhere continued to
speak of the Reds as dangerously prone to violence and the Church
as the world's noblest guardian of peace, humanity, and justice.
Who are the real Reds?
The Church followed up its victory with the customary
inhumanity. All funds and buildings belonging to the workers were
confiscated, and the arbitrary arrests of Socialists continued. By
the beginning of 1937 there were 24,000 political prisoners,
largely men and women who had had no trial, in the jails of
Austria. In that year Miss Margery Fry, a very sane and respected
British prison-reformer, Wm. Rackham of Cambridge University, and
Professor Kimberg, a high authority on prisons, traveled over
Europe on a tour of inspection. They were not permitted in any
country to see how political prisoners were treated, and were not
allowed to visit any jails in Austria, Italy, Germany, and
Portugal. But they brought back and told in the British press a
horrible story of overcrowded jails in Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria,
and Yugo-Slavia, of the use of torture and brutality by jailers and
police, of semi-starvation and cruel conditions, of tens of
thousands who had never had any sort of trial. On the very day on
which I write this a cautious Liberal British paper (News
Chronicle, September 25, 1941), describes just such brutality in
Spanish jails today. And the world-press still refused to see in
these things the shadow of things to come.
That was the new situation in Austria: overcrowded jails,
refusal of trials, torture, and brutality by Catholic jailers. And
over it all the Church waved its blessing. Cardinal Innitzer issued
a special address to the workers, saying that their Holy Mother the
Church affectionately welcomed them back to the fold. There was not
much tenderness about the process, for the Church at once set up an
intolerable tyranny. Every government employee must attend church
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regularly or be fired. Every teacher must go to confession at least
once in three weeks. The splendid system of education which, to the
admiration of the educational world, the Socialists had created was
destroyed and text books of the most mendacious Catholic type were
substituted. Socialist efficiency was replaced by Catholic-Fascist
inefficiency. Though the worst of the world-depression had now
passed. Austria fell into a condition of semi-famine, and the
priests used even this for their purposes. The Annual Register
tells us that the priests at first refused all foreign aid so as to
"force those in distress to apply to Catholic organizations", and
two Englishmen were arrested for giving money to starving people.
Fifty out of sixty seats on the State Cultural Council were
allotted to Catholics.
How Pacelli must have rubbed his hands! So did Hitler. On the
ruins of the Socialist-Communist movement the Nazis of Austria
quickly grew in power. They murdered Dollfuss, whom the priests
replaced with the unhappy and purblind Schuschnigg. Hitler drew
nearer to Mussolini and bought off his interest in Austria by
promising him, with his usual brazen dishonesty, that be should not
only have Savoy, Coisica, and Tunis from France and Dalmatia from
Yugo-Slavia but he should continue to be the dominant power in
Hungary and in all countries south of the Danube. That suited
Pacelli. The Catholics of Austria added to the Catholics of Germany
would give the Vatican a stronger hand in its new deals with the
Nazis, and there might be a glorious bloc of Catholic powers from
Portugal (when the new revolution was accomplished in Spain) to
Bulgar. If I were a man of pinity I should be disposed to quote the
old Latin adage: Those whom God wishe's to destroy he first makes
mad. The destruction of Socialism in Austria and enslavement of the
whole country to Cardinal Innitzer was a most beneficent removal of
obstacles to Hitler's annexation of the country. To this and the
share of the Black International in it we will return later.
Chapter IV
HITLER EXPOSES THE SHAME OF THE CHURCH
Pacelli had soon repented of the hasty attack on Hitler which
he had sent from South America to Cardinal Schulte. Apart from weak
complaints that the Nazis did not observe the Concordat and a
sharper note when he saw the Gestapo men annihilating his treasured
Polish Church by castration and other gentle Nazi methods, he has
never condemned Hitler. Certainly he has never condemned Nazi crime
and bestiality as such, though all the world recognizes that he had
a magnificent field for moral censorship. And his restraint, if you
like to call it that, was not due to any better observance of the
Concordat in Germany. On the contrary, Catholic schools and
associations were disappearing. But to challenge Hitler would lead
at once to more drastic treatment of the Church and he must try to
win a compromise.
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An opportunity occurred in 1935. The rich Saar province had at
the Congress of Versailles been entrusted to the League of Nations
-- really to the exploitation of French industrialists -- for 15
years, and the time had now expired. The inhabitants were to vote
whether or no they would return to Germany. They were
overwhelmingly Catholic so that an issue that was of the greatest
possible importance to Hitler was to be decided by the Church; for
it would be preposterous to suggest that in so delicate a matter
the local hierarchy would act without instructions from the
Vatican. On January 6 the bishops of Speier and Trier, the heads of
the local Church, Issued a letter of instruction that was to be
read in every Catholic Church of the province. Whether or no you
call this interfering in politics they ordered their people to vote
for Hitler. "As German Catholics," they said, "it is out duty to
uphold the greatness, the Welfare, and the peace of our
Fatherland." On the following Sunday, 13th, the voting day, special
prayers were said after Mass for a victory for Hitler (London
Times, January 18). On the same day (18th) the Catholic Times
boasted that Hitler owed his triumph to the Catholics of the Saar,
and it remained to be seen how grateful he would prove. The bells
rang in every Catholic Church when the overwhelming vote in favor
of Hitler was announced; just as they had rung in every Church of
Italy for the triumph of Mussolini.
Hitler made no change in his policy of ignoring the Concordat.
More Catholic schools and associations were closed, and Cardinal
Faulhaber vaguely threatened in one of his sermons to excommunicate
the Nazi leaders: not for their crimes, of course, but for
interfering with Catholic education. Hitler had directed that
Catholic parents in Munich should vote whether they wanted to send
their children to Catholic or to national schools. As a result of
the vote the pupils attending Catholic schools fell from 36,464 to
19,266, and the pupil's of Nazi schools rose from 33 to 65 percent
of the whole. Every priest knew that this meant further enormous
leakage from the Church.
It must have put Pacelli in a painful dilemma when, soon after
this, Hitler demanded a vote of confidence from the entire country.
He had just, in defiance of France and the League of Nations, taken
a very serious step in the realization of his aggressive plan. He
had sent troops to occupy the Rhine provinces which by the terms of
the Treaty were to remain demilitarized. The German people were to
pronounce upon his entire policy: his crimes to date and the
aggressive campaign of which, as everybody knew, the defiance of
Versailles was the first clause.
One would have thought that here was a fine opportunity to
take refuge in the worn cliche that the Church never interferes in
politic's, but the German hierarchy composed a letter that was to
be read in every Church before the vote was taken. It is one of the
many clerical masterpieces of improper advice masquerading as
evasion, which the last ten years have produced. The bishops
recognized the painful dilemma of the faithful. If they voted for
Hitler they might seem to approve of various "measures antagonistic
to the Church" which he had ordered. So they are free to vote as
they will. But if any of them care to vote for Hitler they could do
so with a clear conscience by saying to themselves: "We give our
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vote to the Fatherland but that does not signify approval of
matters for which we could not conscientiously be held responsible"
(Catholic Times, March 27, 1936). In other words, Vote for Hitler.
We recognize the accents of Pacelli-Pius.
The vote of confidence was a farce as such. The point of
interest is that the Black International which had helped to put
Hitler in the saddle in 1933 still supported him in spite of all
his outrages and his open menace to the world's peace. This was in
gratitude for favors to come, and it is one of the most acute
ironies of the time that while the priests were instructing the
Catholic laity in the moral acrobatics by which they could vote for
Hitler that most brazen of adventurers since Caesar Borgia was
actually at work on a measure that would deal the German Church and
the Papacy the most terrible blow they had suffered since Luther
had nailed his theses to the Church door at Wittenberg.
This was the revelation that monasteries which were
represented in Catholic literature -- even in works that circulated
in America -- as fragrant gardens of piety and virtue were
cesspools of moral perversity and that the vice was widespread
amongst the parochial clergy. I have given an account of the early
stages of this exposure in the Haldeman-Julius booklet Vice in
German Monasteries (1937), which is, as far as I can ascertain, the
only lengthy account in the English language. Had so spectacular an
exposure, on so vast a scale, been made in regard to any other body
or Church than the Roman Catholic the press would have erupted into
its largest scare-type and its warmest moral indignation. Such is
the backstairs influence of the Black International in America and
Britain that journalists had to suppress, or publish lies about
the greatest sensation of the year 1936. Here let me round off the
story and set it in the light of later disclosures.
All that the great majority of Americans knew about the matter
was that Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, as part of his indictment
of the Nazis for persecuting the Church -- which was itself
conducting a far worse persecution in Poland and Austria and soon
would be in Spain -- charged them with fabricating an atrocious
libel against the German clergy and said that of the 25,635 priests
of Germany only 58, or a quarter of 1 percent, had been arrested on
a vice-charge. This was a statement (which no one in America could
cheek) made by the German bishops, and it was an audacious evasion,
if not untruth. The B.U.P. and Reuter message which conveyed the
words of the bishops added, significantly, that "eleven Roman
Catholic priests were arrested in Munich this week-end" and told of
two other arrests for assaults on little girls a few days later.
The figure is preposterous but the implication is worse. The
"thousands" of offenders of whom the Nazis spoke were not priests.
They were monks or what the Catholic calls lay brothers.
The difference is important. Priests in Germany as in America
have parochial duties, an important part of which is visiting homes
in the husband's absence and being visited by girls and women, like
ministers of other denominations. All of them have female domestic
servants in their houses. When they are disposed to violate their
vow of chastity they have ample opportunities, and of this sort of
indulgence the German law takes no more cognizance than the
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
American law does, as long as they do not seduce minors under their
charge. Their circumstances do not particularly incline them to
sodomy. It is in the monastic communings, especially of lay (or
non-priest) brothers, who are devoted to teaching and the care of
the sick, mentally feeble, etc., that the pretense of special
holiness breaks down. The word "monk" is not a technical but
popular word, and it is applied to these in Catholic literature.
The large communities and work of charity are particularly
recommended in Catholic literature as proof of the Church's
inspiration, and they and the nuns number, or numbered, ten's of
thousands in Germany. Those of the Franciscan Order were
particularly praised, and the largest community of them, at
Waldbreitbach, in Westphalia, were described as a holy institution
to which no other religion could show a parallel.
It was just here, at Waldbreitbaeb and other Franciscan
communities, that the police were busy gathering evidence at the
very time when the bishops were telling Catholics to vote for
Hitler, and proof was accumulating that these holy places were not
only comprehensively but revoltingly corrupt. Father-confessors
seduced for years the young novices who came in. Monks confessed in
the witness-box how on the holiest days (when all monks feed and
drink most) they reeled along the corridors to the chapel and
halted in dark corners I have told all that from their own
confessions in court. There is nothing like it in Boccaccio or
Rabelais; and it had been going on for an indefinite time. There
had been prosecutions early in the century, but in those days one
quickly let the Catholic curtain fall again if it revealed anything
nasty.
One point only must be repeated here. The charge that the
trials of the monks were travesties of justice, on a level with the
Berlin trial of the Communists for the burning of the Reichstag, is
entirely false. The public is apt to assume this, since the Nazi
variety of justice is notorious and the plain man has no means of
checking statements about Germany. But men like Mundelein or the
German-American priests who assisted him must have known better.
One such priest visited Germany to ascertain "the truth" in 1938
and lingering in Britain to communicate this personally ascertained
"truth" to the British press -- and Catholics, as usual, got
replies to him excluded from the press -- he returned in triumph to
America. His verdict was just what Mundelein said: Less than 60
priests in Germany had been prosecuted, and the rest was Nazi
fabrication. This priest knew that the German bishops from whom he
got his figure admitted the depravity in monasteries's of religious
brothers, that the Vatican also admitted it by suppressing whole
provinces of them for irregularity of conduct, and that the
Catholics of Germany fully admitted it.
There can be very little doubt that Hitler directed the
prosecution. He knew that he had in this epidemic of vice a ground
that would go very far even in the eyes of Catholics to justify his
refusal to honor the terms of the Concordat he had signed. But he
also knew that he would give the bishops a means to stir the
Catholic body bitterly against him instead of winning its support
unless such charges were proved beyond cavil. He took care that
this was done.
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
The arrests and trial's were, in the first place, almost
entirely in the Catholic provinces where these communities are most
numerous and, as it proved, most vicious; as the small communities
in Protestant provinces are as critically watched as in America and
Britain. All the police-officials charged with the preliminary
inquiries and the arrests were Catholics and the courts
predominantly Catholic. Every witness against the monks was a
Catholic, and nearly every one of the accused pleaded guilty,
blaming the morbid conditions of the life and the drunkenness that
was permitted. The trials were held, in the normal form, in the
high courts of the capitals of these Catholic provinces (mostly
Cologne, Bonn, Coblentz, and Munich) and were reported daily in the
chief papers of the provinces, which have three Catholic reader's
to one non-Catholic; and these papers fully sustained the verdicts
and admitted the guilt.
Are these just Nazi allegations? Not at all. During 1936 and
1937 I followed the trials in these papers -- effectively, Catholic
papers -- chiefly the Koinische Zeitung and the Westfalische Kurier
checked by Berlin and Munich papers, and got the details from them.
They even sometimes rapped their own prelates on the knuckle's for
trying to gloss over or deny the ugly facts. I read fairly lengthy
reports of scores of individual trials of monks, priests (sometimes
of high rank), and even a nun (for seducing boy-pupils). Nine out
of ten of the monks were convicted of sodomy, as were most of the
priests, though some were charged with indecent relations with
young girls (down to 12 or 13) and were proved by their
parishioners to have done this over a period of many years.
The charge was generally sodomy, and this, as I said, fully
explains why there were, comparatively, so few priests. Fornication
is not an offence in law, and so the priests do not as a rule come
under the notice of the police. There were a few arrests of zealous
priests for attacking the government (over the Concordat) in
sermons and many prosecution for smuggling currency out of Germany.
The police found that the Church used demure looking nuns and
venerable friars, their holy costumes stuffed with notes, to make
a profit in the sternly forbidden exchange-transactions or to
smuggle money to Rome. But in the overwhelming majority of cases
the charge was sodomy, and the next most frequent charge the
corruption of young girls. The World Almanac for 1939 says (p.
236):
"Up to October, 1938, more than 8,000 Catholic monks and lay
brothers had been arrested by Nazi officials, approximately 50
percent of the 16,000 members of German monasteries, on various
charges, including immorality, sedition, breaches of exchange laws,
abuse of the pulpit, collecting fund's without government
permission, or failure to fly the Swastika flag on national
monuments. Forty-five monks, 176 lay-brothers, and 21 monastery
employees were sentenced on immorality charges: 188 priests were
acquitted or released without trial."
It is pleasant to find that an American publication had the
courage to print so much -- no British publication had, and I
failed to get a publisher for a book -- but the details are
misleading. "Arrested by Nazi officials" does not mean the Gestapo,
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
but, generally, Catholic policemen and officers. The list of
charges is misleading because sodomy far outnumbered the others;
and the last sentence is particularly unfortunate. Over the period
of nearly two years in which I followed the trials 90 percent were
for vice, and very few of the accused escaped, and then only in
virtue of an earlier amnesty. Many of these were priest-monks,
though of the 400 Franciscan monks of the Westphalian province, who
were the first to be arraigned, 61 (mostly the directing priests
and superiors) got secret warning and fled the country (many to
Rome), which left a disproportion of priests to monks in the 276
who were arrested. The province was found to be wholly corrupt and
the Pope abolished it after a few trials. The non-monastic priests
who were arrested were scattered over Germany and only casually
mentioned in the press, but of the cases I collected nine-tenths
again were for vice (boys and little girls), hardly one in ten was
acquitted. Later there were more numerous arrests for "sedition" or
criticism of the "persecution of the Church".
Chapter V
THE POPE CONTINUES TO COURT HITLER
Hitler is a rotten speaker: raucous in voice, graceless in
gesture, and loose in the composition of his speeches. It is not
"personal magnetism" that makes him a power with the young -- the
older are mostly driven to his gatherings -- but a belief in his
genius that is artificially created by years of the most elaborate
and most persistent boosting. The most effective speech he ever
made was on January 1, 1939, when he replied to the Vatican and
world-complaint that he persecuted the Church. There was, of
course, a fallacy in his argument. Unquestionably he wanted to
change the Catholic Church in Germany in a sense which the Vatican
could not possibly accept and of this he said nothing, but his
direct reply to the charge of persecution of religion was
effective.
The German government has always subsidized the Churches but
Hitler had more than trebled the subsidy. Between 1933, when he
took office, and 1938 it rose from 1,50,000,000 Marks to
500,000,0,00 a year. What was your subsidy to the Churches, he
asked of France, Britain, an America? He had never closed a church,
and he left the Roman Church the richest land-owner in south and
west Germany. It drew 1,500,000,000 Marks a year from its property
alone. (German papers give its wealth as $20,000,000,000). All that
he asked was that priests should behave themselves as respectably
as other citizens. "Paederasty and the corruption of children," he
said, "are punished by law like other crimes in this state." The
roars of applause in this case expressed the sentiment of
practically the whole of Germany.
And the Black International knew it. In foreign countries they
dare not stake their case on the question whether the vice-trials
were or were not genuine. An impartial press-inquiry would soon
settle that. They preferred to use their censorship of the press to
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
prevent any mention of them or to confuse the public with a vague
charge of persecution and talk about smuggling currency and
criticizing the Nazis. I cannot speak for the American press but as
far as I could ascertain no British paper even mentioned the
Sensational trials that were spread over 1936 to 1938 and then
extended to Austria. Was there ever such self-denial on the part of
newspaper men? You know why.
At the Vatican and in Germany this was clearly recognized. The
trials had begun at the end of May (1936). After ten trials the
Pope suppressed the Westphalian province of the Franciscan Order,
its largest and richest province, for irregularity: a step without
precedent in modern times and so grave that only a desperate hope
of disarming Hitler can have prompted it. But the trials went on
until the influx of foreigners for the Olympic Games made it
advisable to suspend them. Some of these foreigners might be able
to read German and learn how monks of pure Aryan blood talked
indecency to children under ten on the steps of their houses, raped
helpless youths in their hospitals . . . In the period of
suspension, with 260 friars still in prison awaiting trial, the
bishops, who probably knew how far the search for culprits would
reach -- for evidence had been given in court that youths had
reported the matter to ecclesiastical authorities and been silenced
-- approached Hitler. The British press reported in August that
they had conferred with Hitler on the "currency-charges" against
priests and monks. There were then few currency-charges but
hundreds of vice-charges, so we know what they wanted; especially
as there was nothing to protest against in the fines for smuggling
currency.
Next month the bishops, now clearly under Pacelli's orders,
made a fresh attempt. On September 12, 1936, the Nazionale Zeitung
published a copy of a letter from the bishops to the faithful which
was to be read in all the Catholic Churches of Germany next day. It
trusted that Hitler would bury the past and admit Catholics to
cooperate with him in the fight against the ever-increasing threat
of world-Bolshevism which shows its sinister hand in Spain, Russia
and Mexico. As they added that "guns are not enough to fight the
Bolshevik danger -- a sound lead is necessary to secure victory,"
they very clearly wanted Hitler to crush Bolshevism in Russia by
war and so consecrated his program of aggression. And as these
words of theirs are an echo of words that the Pope had used a few
weeks earlier it is obvious that Pacelli was the author. He had at
last, in the summer of 1936, matured his program and found his
slogan: the extinction of Bolshevism in Russia, Spain, and Mexico.
Sometimes to give respectability to his Japanese alliance, he added
-- China. As I have earlier said, the A.F.L. defeated his plan to
get America to attack Mexico, but it remains true that he wanted
the war. The rest of his slogan stands. He was pledged to support
the plans of aggressive war of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the
foulest nations on earth.
Hitler ignored the bishops, but Pacelli still pressed. On
November 4 the Times reported that Mussolini was pressing Hitler to
come to terms with the Vatican, as this would not only give him
more weight in the "clerical state" which Franco was to set up in
Spain but would help him in his designs on Austria: a hint at the
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
part the Church would play when the time came to annex that
country. Mussolini was at this time a practicing Catholic once
more. Also he had begun, with the enthusiastic support of the Black
International his brutal campaign in Abyssinia and his hypocritical
action in Spain.
A week later (Times, November 13, 1936) Hitler had a request
for an interview from Cardinal Faulhaber. He received him
grudgingly and more or less secretly, and when the Cardinal put
before him the request of the bishops and asked in return for the
control of Catholic education by the Church, the Minister of
Education, whom, Hitler had invited to be present, advised him to
refuse. The Churches were, he insisted, negligible allies, as they
had lost their power over men's minds in many part of the world."
The offer of the Church was refused, and the destruction of
Catholic schools, as new vice-trials of the religious teachers gave
a pretext, and associations continued.
Nevertheless the Vatican remained on such terms with Germany
that when, in March, 1937, there was a mild rebuke of breaches of
the Concordat in a new encyclical and Mundelein continued his
violent campaign in America, the German government sent a complaint
to Rome. Catholics boasted that the Vatican refused to listen, but
there was no breach. Indeed, a month later Count Preysing, the
aristocratic Catholic bishop of Berlin, addressed another appeal to
Hitler (Times, July 3, 1937). It is in this that we get the
admission of monastic corruption. It said that the bishop's "do not
deny that in certain orders of lay brothers many members had been
drawn into a sphere of serious moral perversities." Perhaps one
could not expect a more strongly worded admission from such a
source, but the shifting of responsibility from the priests to the
lay brothers is very misleading. These lay brothers of the
Franciscan Order, of whom nearly 300 in one province were arrested
for sodomy, were under the direct authority of the clerical heads
of the Order, were periodically examined by representatives of
those authorities and were in each monastery ruled by a number of
priest-monks. Evidence was given by the brothers in the trials that
the epidemic of vice had been reported to the authorities in these
periodical examinations which are (of the most intimate character)
and no notice had been taken.
There was no modification of the Nazi policy. In December the
Pope feebly complained to his cardinals, when they came to him with
their Christmas greetings, of the persecution in Germany. The
excuse was, he said, that the Church interfered in polities. Even
the cardinals must have smiled when the aged and not very clear-
headed Pope went on to say that "no fair-minded man" could Say that
the Church ever interfered in politics. A few month's earlier he
had summoned the powers to crush by war the kind of government
which the people of Spain and Mexico had freely chosen and
supported at every election: the form of government which, whatever
its beginning, had won the support of the entire Russian people, as
all the world now realizes. At that very moment the Vatican was
working with its murderous allies to change the political form of
Spain, had mercilessly intervened in polities in Austria for years,
had given, its blessing to the enslavement of the Abyssinian
people, and had helped to establish Fascism in South America.
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One might have expected that in these circumstances the Papacy
would assert what was left of its moral dignity and abandon the
dishonoring opportunism that had characterized its relations with
the brutal Nazis since 1932. On the pretty theory of the Papacy
which is put before the world its duty was to denounce the crimes
of Nazi Germany and the menace to the world of its naked ambition
and let German Catholics take such punishment from the criminals as
Catholics are supposed to endure with heroism rather than bow the
knee to iniquity.
It may be objected that at the most we can accuse Pacelli, who
was entirely responsible for the policy of the senile Pontiff, of
an error of judgment in a grave dilemma. That would be a
misrepresentation of the position. He clung to his German, Italian,
and Japanese allies, not singly to avert persecution from Catholics
in their dominions -- and we must remember that even in this the
real concern of the Black International is the loss of members
under the strain -- but because his policy coincided with theirs.
When the time comes for China to recover its territory, as it
surely must come if the poison is to be got out of the veins of the
world, Roman Catholic influence in the Far East will be very justly
restricted. The Vatican has irretrievably pledged itself to the
Japanese bully. in Italy it is not less firmly pledged to the
support of Mussolini. What Cardinal Hinsley said, that if Mussolini
falls the "cause of God" - of the Black International -- falls,
remains true. Socialism would get control of Italy, and the time
has gone by for triumphant democrats to handle with kid gloves the
reactionary elements that have shed blood whenever they temporarily
recovered power; besides that Fascist Italy is indispensable to the
Pope's fantastic plan of a great bloc of Fascist-Catholic powers to
offset the influence of the democracies, or their rich Catholic
minorities, in the Church.
And beyond all this is the Church's indispensable need of a
Fascist atmosphere in any state in which it is to flourish. As I
have shown, the apparent progress of the Church in such democracies
as America and Britain is a fallacy. Not only does it lose instead
of advancing if the birth rate is taken into account, but migration
from backward Catholic countries is the adequate explanation of the
apparent progress. In France, where there has been no such
immigration on a large scale, the membership of the Church fell in
30 years from 30,000,000 to about 5,000,000 when (in 1871) the
country became a democracy; and it was the same in Italy and Spain
as long as they were democracies. There is not a single exception
to the law that free discussion is fatal to the Roman system. Its
effect is merely modified in America and Britain by the conspiracy
of the Black International to intimidate editors, publishers,
booksellers, librarians, etc., and the drastic law that. Catholics
shall not read critics of the Church.
Hence in Germany a policy that is purely ecclesiastical and
takes no account of moral and social considerations has to cling at
all cost and in spite of all rebuffs to the hope of disarming the
hostility of the Nazis and helping to maintain them in power. Both
the rebuffs and the policy of appeasement continued. On October 15,
1938, the Volkischer Beobachter, a recognized Nazi organ, said: "We
are armed to continue the battle against Catholicism to the point
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HOW THE CROSS COURTED THE SWASTIKA
of total annihilation." Vice-prosecutions multiplied, and the Nazis
called for, and would presently obtain, the suppression of all
Catholic schools in Bavaria. And remember that while Catholic
influence in America could, by getting the essential facts
concealed from the American public, represent this as a piece of
wanton persecution of religion, every German knew that it was done
on the ground judicially established in hundreds of cases, that the
most respecter Catholic teachers, the brothers who were vowed to
chastity and asceticism, were corrupt and corruptors. The
philanthropic institutions-schools, orphanages, infirmaries, etc.,
of which the Church had been so proud were taken over by the
authorities and entrusted to laymen.
I am in this booklet confining myself to Germany so that the
reader may get a clear view of the strange situation in that
country insofar as it concerns the Church. It must, however be
understood that the humiliation of the proud Church in 1938 was far
greater than we realize if we restrict our attention to Germany. In
Spain the Vatican and the Nazis were actually cooperating in that
holy war for the extinction of Bolshevism, which was now Pacelli's
ruling passion. In Austria and Czecho-Slovakia the Black
International rendered even more useful service than cooperation.
It prepared the way for those bloodies's triumphs of the Nazis
which history will record to the deep shame of the western
democracies; the triumphs of lying by which Hitler preserved his
armies for the attack on France, Britain, and Russia and gradually
pressed all the rest of Europe into the position of bleeding slaves
in his war-galley. How the Vatican helped him to do this, and how
Pacelli became Pope in 1939 and contemplated the ghastly
consequences of his policy yet persisted in it while the whole
civilized and free world was filled with moral indignation will be
told in a later book.
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